To the Lake

by Kapka Kassabova

  I swam in the warm dark water, and even drank from it, but only once – there was an unsettling feeling of something lurking beneath. One day, I drove round the lake to the Greek border. Maybe I could cross into Greece after all, even though people said the checkpoint had been closed for as long as they remembered. The road moved inland from the lake, making the lake feel out of reach. You could see it but you couldn’t smell it or touch it. The colours of Prespa were deep and saturated, even on a warm day like today, and though the surface looked calm, something seemed to move underneath. Only the closest mountains had texture and reality. Those beyond were like a painted world.

  I passed through miles of orchards whose apples looked so tempting that I pulled over and looked in the grass. It was the fallen, bruised ones that were being gathered now and sold as fodder. I passed through villages where only a cockerel or a barking dog was to be heard, and minarets and bell-towers alternated.

  At a Muslim cemetery I discovered a mixture of old graves – anonymous mossy stone slabs – and fresh graves, each with a ceramic jug. A burial rite from antiquity! The jugs were to carry the soul to the next world. Treasure hunters had told me that jug fragments marked an ancient burial spot, but I had never seen them in a modern cemetery. The names and dedications were Albanian. This was the Village of the White Church, named after a large church that over time has vanished inside a glade. The population was now Albanian-speaking Bektashi, but it had once been Christian, and before that, Thracian-Illyrian, and before that – just the lake with its churning weathers, millennium after millennium.

  Syncretism – the blending of religious and cultural motifs – was a speciality of the lake district, and of Balkan civilisation in general. It had two main features: survival and creativity, the second in service to the first. It could even be said that the modern people of the lakes, the Albanians and the Macedonians, owed their existential survival to syncretism.

  ‘Oh I don’t know any more,’ said the man who ran an ethnographic museum from his house in a nearby village. ‘They used to speak Turkish, now they speak Albanian. I can’t keep up.’

  He was a former folk dancer, and the costumes he had collected, both Christian and Muslim, were from every region of Macedonia. They embodied a collective creative genius, a magnificent confluence of the Orient, the Occident, the mountainous Balkans, and the mythical imagination. There was a woman’s costume three hundred years old – layer upon layer of wool and linen, with thousands of Turkish and Bulgarian coins sewn onto it. It weighed sixty kilos, his wife told me.

  ‘So that the woman couldn’t run away,’ I said, but she didn’t laugh – to her they were like people. But I wasn’t joking.

  ‘If you can guess the purpose of this vestment, you can have it,’ the husband said, and held up a richly embroidered square throw onto which tiny mirrors were sewn. It was a century old.

  ‘I’ll give you a clue. It’s from the Mavrovo Mountains up north, where the clothes women wore showed what stage of life they were at.’

  Of course. If you’re a woman, everyone must know your sexual, marital and reproductive status at all times.

  ‘Bridal?’ I chanced, and he beamed. ‘To cover the bride’s head.’

  ‘Close! But I’m not giving you the cloth.’

  It was for the horse, so that when a bride rode into her new life, the little mirrors would deflect the evil eye – an essentially shamanic practice. Another costume, from Mariovo, a canyon region in Pelagonia made a ghost country by mass emigration, featured headgear like a rolled turban, made from thick felt and adorned with felt fruits, myriad mirrors and colourful beads. It was a crown fit for a mountain queen. The town ones featured furs. The Muslim ones were an explosion of colour, glitter and fine stripes, a celebration of silks and brocades.

  And the Prespan ones?

  ‘Over here.’ He moved to a mannequin dressed in black. The little girl mannequin next to her was also in black. Black wool from head to toe, a funeral cortege of two.

  To be female is to grieve. It had caught me out, once again, just when I thought I was safe, away from Ohrid. But something about these costumes touched a nerve.

  ‘Prespan women were as good as widows,’ he agreed. ‘Because their husbands went abroad for twenty years on gurbet.’

  Gurbet: Turkish for work abroad, or exile. In the Balkans, there is an entire culture of gurbet – gurbet songs, gurbet houses, gurbet fortunes, and gurbet widows. To this day. This is how, with the men absent or insufficient, mothers and daughters and grandmothers become betrothed to each other in a kind of black wedding.

  ‘We don’t get many visitors,’ said the couple. ‘Very few people visit Prespa.’

  I bought some white linen cloth made by them in winter, when the lake is full of snowdrifts and howling wind.

  I drove on and the malaise grew in the pit of my stomach, as if I was trying to swallow something indigestible. Black should not be worn for long periods of time. Was darkness this land’s only reliable harvest? That was what this journey was about, after all – to get to the source of the darkness, and the love, and here in Prespa, to my surprise, I felt I was getting close.

  Howling wind, snowdrifts, vortices and unstable lake levels were woven into the human history of Prespa. Like Macedonia’s multi-layered costumes, the lake rose into a polyphony of plots and subplots.

  In the collective imagination, Prespa was indelibly marked by the reign and fall of Tsar Samuil. People spoke of Samuil’s time as if only a few generations had passed, not a millennium. The largest Roman town in the Prespa district, Pretor, had been the base for Samuil’s royal guard. One Pretorian family, the Jonovski, traced their lineage to the medieval clan Sudjovtsi, ancestors of a nobleman, or bolyar, called Simeon. Simeon had been in Tsar Samuil’s immediate entourage. En route to the border, I dropped into the family home in Pretor, unannounced.

  A woman in black opened the door. She was widowed and lived alone by the lake, tending her apple trees. Her elderly brother-in-law, a literary translator, was on a visit from Skopje. He was an introverted man with a pained face, as if holding on to an illness or an old secret. His journalist father had written several books on Prespa. The family had always lived in Pretor, except for a spell in the eighteenth century when they left for Istanbul as Ali Pasha’s men torched their way through villages here, just for fun. The family did well in Istanbul as orchardists and vintners, then returned home. Many became monks and nuns – an ingenious way, possibly the only way, to hold on to their extensive fields, by donating them to the nearest monastery and moving in. No one touched monastery grounds, or at least not in peacetime. There was still something monk-like about the brother-in-law.

  Despite the mean-spirited denial and destruction wreaked by each new ruler on the previous ruler’s legacy, Pretor kept churning up antique and medieval artefacts. The brother-in-law, pale at the garden table where the widow had placed a bowl of picture-perfect apples, squinted against the sun.

  ‘The Macedonian Front passed through Pretor,’ he said. ‘Our people were on this side, and the Serbs, French and English to the south.’

  He was writing his own book on Prespa, Tsar Samuil, and the family. There was a faraway look about him, as if he was more connected to the distant past than to the present of the lake. The widow gave me an apple for the road, and he told me to look for clues in the place names of Prespa. Place names were key narrators because so much material and written heritage had been destroyed. In the village of Wolf-Skinner people once hunted wolves and sold their skins. The Village of Bloodletting had seen massacres, and Preljubje, the Village of the Lustful, was named after an allegedly over-libidinous medieval Serbian prince who owned the province. Most intriguingly, the village of Asamati or ‘the Bodiless Ones’, a Greek derivation, referred to the spirits believed to watch over the lake.

  The lake’s name, like much of its history, is an enigma. Prespa appears in the historic sources of different languages as a lake, a vale, an island, a town, a royal p
alace, a river, and a religious centre of the ubiquitous lacustrine patron saints Clement and Naum. Even the quartet of novels by Dimitar Talev featuring the eternal Sultana is set in a fictional town called Prespa. But the only certain physical entity to have gone by the name of Prespa is the lake. In Ohrid, it was the water that seemed illusory at times. In Prespa, it was the very nature of reality.

  One of the earliest recorded uses of the name is linked to the following story.

  Some years after the deaths of the lakes’ patron saints, a Byzantine chronicler wrote that a freakish winter had occurred, an immemorially cold winter. Animals and people perished from hunger. The lake froze over. In December 927, two messengers were travelling from southern Albania to the Pelagonian plains with an important missive. They were caught in a blizzard. They knew to follow the shore of a lake to the south-east. But there was no lake, just endless vales of snowdrift and ice. At the point of succumbing to a white death, they glimpsed a tower in the snow. It was Pretor. The Pretorians took them in and rubbed their bodies with snow and alcohol. When they came round, the messengers asked: Where is Pelagonia? It’s east of here over that big mountain, the Pretorians answered, but it’s all snowdrifts from here to there, prespa after prespa. Where’s the lake? the messengers asked. You’re on it, the answer came. This is Prespa. You’ve just crossed it diagonally. One of the messengers died of shock. The other continued on into the blizzard and a month later delivered the missive.

  It is not said what the missive contained, but this tale is a reminder that the unsung endurance of messengers like these was vital in this difficult terrain. I imagine them as the long-distance lorry drivers of yesteryear – their lonely journeys across vales of snow, their nights of solace in villages where people speak forgotten tongues, their sealed cargoes more important than their lives.

  Pretor touched the shore – and some of it was under water – but from here, the road went uphill again and so did the villages, only returning to the lake in the last few miles before the border. A cop waved me down. I got out of the car. Butterflies fluttered in the undergrowth that led down to a beach.

  ‘The road ends here,’ the border cop said listlessly.

  You could in fact see exactly where it ended after the barricade, and on the other side was grass, as if there had never been a road. The cop was a large young man with a prematurely collapsed frame. He lit a cigarette and offered me one, glad of the company. I asked how long it had been closed.

  He waved towards the lake to indicate infinity.

  ‘The Greek colleagues are there on the other side,’ he said. ‘We get together for a dram.’

  They spoke English, he grinned, though the Greeks understood Macedonian. ‘And we’ve learned some Greek ourselves.’

  This was the mutual way of checkpoints. Even disused ones.

  The lake was veined with quivering threads of light, like mercury. The air was medicinally good. The first village on the other side was German (Agios Germanos), a couple of miles on. You could easily walk to it among the fruit trees and butterflies. But to get there legally, I’d have to drive over Pelister, east along the Via Egnatia into Greece, before descending again to Prespa.

  ‘That’s another hundred and seventy kilometres!’ I said. ‘And several mountain chains.’

  ‘It sure is,’ the cop shrugged, and returned to his kiosk, his body slumped like an old man’s, his head in a halo of butterflies.

  Like him, I sat slumped in the car, looking at the silver water.

  The lake accumulated time but did nothing with it, not in human terms. It sucked it into its vortices, for some unspecified later use. The checkpoint had been closed unilaterally by Greece during their military junta, fifty years ago.

  I had already decided to see Greek Prespa, driving the long way round. I’d arranged to meet at the weekend with an Australian friend from London, whose maternal grandparents were Macedonian exiles. I turned the car round and drove once more past the last village, called The Gouged Ones, in memory of the end days of Tsar Samuil’s Prespa. There was a bakery there that made delicious stuffed pastry, but the severed road had stifled my appetite and I drove on to a higher mountain village instead, trying to make sense of Samuil’s legacy. The Samuil narrative was a staple of national history in Bulgaria, and more recently in the Republic of (North) Macedonia. It came to life here, by the lake, through legends, place names, and physical remains of Samuil’s days.

  Samuil was one of four brothers of the Komitopouli dynasty founded by the Bulgarian Komita (Count) Nikola. All had Old Testament names, like their Armenian mother Ripsimi. The southern Balkans, including Byzantine territories, were roughly consolidated into an empire-like kingdom by Samuil and his brother Aaron. Their two other brothers had been killed. By the late 980s, Samuil had control over much of the Balkan peninsula, all the way south into Thessaly. His empire, which aimed to unite all Slavs, at least in theory, stretched from the Danube to the Aegean and from the Adriatic to the Black Sea. But with a neighbour like Basil II of Byzantium, such gains were always going to be contested.

  Samuil’s turbulent rule lasted thirty-nine years and the war between Samuil and Basil II thirty-one, a long time for a war but a short time for an empire. Samuil was able to repeatedly repel Basil thanks to the impregnable mountains of Bulgaria and Macedonia, much feared by enemy armies, and to his military talent. But Basil was hell-bent on retaking territory, battle by battle. He was a ‘pathologically mean’ man, in the words of one English historian. It was one of his life’s missions to destroy Samuil politically. He couldn’t forget the humiliation he had suffered when his army of forty thousand was annihilated at the Gates of Trajan near Sredets (Sofia).

  But the destruction of Samuil’s reign started from within – just like the vendetta story of Trena’s mother in which ‘the Turks’ were only the catalyst. Byzantine intrigue, aimed at dividing the Komitopouli, had already infiltrated Samuil’s family by the time he and Aaron reached forty. On learning about his beloved brother’s supposed conspiracy with the Byzantines, Samuil had Aaron executed along with his family – an act after which, it is said, something in Samuil became permanently distorted. War with Basil II was now his main purpose in life.

  A note of mercy is introduced at this point: one of Aaron’s sons, Ivan-Vladislav, was saved from avuncular execution through the intervention of his cousin, Samuil’s son Gavril-Radomir. The two cousins lived in Ohrid’s royal court for a time. But mercy was not reciprocated: thirty years later, when Gavril-Radomir took over his dead father Samuil’s throne, Ivan-Vladislav had him murdered during a hunt above Prespa, at the instigation of none other than Basil II – who had in return promised him exclusive powers. Gavril-Radoslav’s Thessalian wife was also murdered, and their eldest son blinded. A pattern emerges.

  As an act of punishment short of taking a life, blinding was first practised by the Persians on their captured enemies, and became de rigueur in the Byzantine world. A blind man can’t be general or king. In centuries to come, the savage act of blinding would be unconsciously repeated in the digging-out of painted saints’ and kings’ eyes.

  A prophet had warned Samuil of the rising levels of the lake, as the water approached his palace on St Achillius island. Take heed, the seer said, rising water bodes ill. But it was too late, the wheels of history were turning, and geography really was destiny: the simple fact of being next door to Byzantium determined the fate of Samuil’s people. And so did the existence of the Via Egnatia: it was all about having control over that vital artery between Dyrrachium on the Adriatic, Thessaloniki on the Aegean, and the Bosphorus.

  That same prophet had also warned, early on, that the Komitopouli would reign over a mighty empire – but tragically, for brother would kill brother. Perhaps, had Samuil spared his brother Aaron, things would have turned out differently.

  The endgame came with the Battle of Kleidon, also known as the Battle of Klyuch, in 1014, won through sheer luck by the Byzantines in the gorges of the River Struma (Strym
onas) where Macedonia and Thrace overlap. Both Kleidon and Klyuch mean ‘key’. The two enemies – Samuil and Basil ‘Bulgarochthonos’, the Bulgar-Slayer, as he went down in history – never met. But legend has it that after the battle, Samuil’s captured army of fourteen or fifteen thousand men was subjected by Basil II to medieval history’s worst atrocity. All the soldiers were blinded, with a one-eyed man left for each hundred souls, to lead them westwards to their tsar.

  It is a tableau of suffering on a scale not quite human. To blind fifteen thousand people requires an industry of blinders, but the Byzyantines were fully capable of that. As if Basil II had wanted to maim not just the enemy, but all of humanity. There are sites along the returning soldiers’ long east–west route across the mountain chains of Macedonia, where mineral springs gush from the skirts of the multiplying massifs in a sea of vapours like freshly laundered linens. There the blind army stopped to rest and wash their eye wounds, the legend tells. It was late summer. They took three months to walk the three hundred kilometres to Prespa.

  I think of those eyeless men of many ethnicities and languages, returning to Prespa amidst nature’s symphony of colours they couldn’t see. Samuil’s army contained many men from the lakes. The fastest foot soldiers were Albanians who came in their fustanellas, and Vlachs (Aromanians) who fought in their full furs, even in summer. The cavalry was led by ethnic Bulgars whose ancestors had come galloping across the Asian steppes. The most numerous were the Balkan Slavs, peasants largely of the Bogomil persuasion, the movement that resisted Byzantine-style feudal and ecumenical oppression and formed their own communes. They enjoyed unrepeated protection under Samuil, and some believe that his family were Bogomils too. Once Samuil’s empire fell, the Lakes became part of the Byzantine theme, or province, of Bulgaria.